This one's called:
TOTALLY BONKERS ABOUT THE FIERY FURNACES

So the Fiery Furnaces are releasing a new album in June. We can't talk about that yet though. Have you heard their last album? Its called Gallowsbird's Bark and its damn nifty. Go get it.




What? You don't like it? First of all, shut up. Second of all, listen to it again... Okay. You're beginning to come around. Give it some time. Come back in one week.



Okay! Hey! Yeah, you're welcome, I know. I KNOW. So yeah, that was a pretty sextacular album, wasn't it? One problem I had as a pop dude: not so many choruses. Now, I know what these kind of bands go for with their 'defiance of traditional song structure' and you know that that means they can't successfully utilize energy in a song, otherwise they wouldn't be afraid of people remembering their music. Okay. Back off. So: you hear the little megaphone noise that starts the album and you're thrown into hysterics. You hear the part where the organ rhumba box speeds up at the end of "Bow Wow" and you think "I've done that before, that's so fun!". You hear the parts where the guitar and bass which usually on records like this (well there are no Records like this, but you know, the inferior 'like this') ahem which usually on records like this are played with the proficiency of a ninth grader (though God Bless 'Em, with all the zeal of Jimmy Page) but hey, these guitar lines are pretty dang proficient. "Don't Dance Her Down" anyone? Pretty dang efficient indeed. And when the record gets to "Rub Alcohol Blues" and the bass and piano are outlining what we're all thinking: Sheezam! That's about where you should be. So, like me, you are probably waiting for their next album with your finger on the trigger of a gun and your gun pointed at a mailbox.

Well the wait is worth it. Shoot it. Shoot that gun. Blueberry Boat, the quick follow-up to history's favorite debut is smashtacular like your aunty wouldn't want you to believe. It rollicks it rocks, it tosses those dinner rolls out all over the table and forces you to pick them up and apologize, even though your actions were in the spirit of the moment, and then the moment moves on to the next and you aren't picking up and apologizing for dinner rolls, you're kung-fu fighting in a San Fransisco tunnel of some sort, maybe on a bridge. And the music isn't that old cliche' kung fu music that everybody says they love but can't find a non-boring example of it. I guess its the action that meets the music. But this time as you kung fu fight your worries away (and cars are driving underneath) you have the Fiery Furnaces to keep you company like so many a squandered night away at the arcade.

This album changes moods like your crazy art teacher that is one moment showing you how to clean a brush, the next second holding you hostage at brushpoint, and just like that exact same teacher, full of wonderful stories that are told in a wonderful fashion like you'll never know. About how she knocked off a bank in Texas and then rode a giant fish all the way up to Norway and there she met the king and the king asked for her hand in marraige but she said no way and accepted a lifetime supply of Doritos in exchange, which she had no need for, so she donated them to the Orphan's Home in Taiwan, where she found her future son-in-law. Its like that, only with music and better. And the music? Its better. More concise.

Remember what I said about the songs not having any choruses? Well now they don't have verses either. Which is a good thing for this sort of thing. They get bored quick this time around, so they change to the next part of the song, which they haven't even written yet. So they use their wacky sibling psychic powers and groove that sucker out. It opens with a bit of the ol' electronics, you'll think you were listening to the new Radiohead or something (except there's no slurred political vagueness in sight). The electronics are gone in a prog flurry by the four and a half minute mark. And then the guy in the band starts singing. And then the electrick blues come in. And then the guitars do a cool thing. Guitars in general do lots of things without me being excited, but there's exciting/excited guitar all over this song. The guy says 'pepsi' I think, which makes me all sort of giddy. I'm sure this would all be SICK with the speakers and equalizers and maximizers all the way up to 10 or 0 or 500% or whatever those things are. But I'm in an apartment with thin walls, so I'm being quiet as a courtesy to my televisioning flatmates.

I should really be reading Henry Fielding's "Joseph Andrews" right now.

Wah wah guitar comes pretty close to its hilarious potential here. I'm sure its the funnies thing ever if your stoned. It got dark outside just now without me knowing. I saw it and thought 'uh oh'. There's a couple minutes of just the girl singing and guitar going and tambourine and something else hitting. Squiggly keyboards come in that are more like the year 1975 than the year 2001 the song began in. The next song "Straight Street" opens with more of those zany zoopy guitars sliding up and down the countries border. Pianos come in disrespectfully not paying attention to the key that the other pianos are playing in. As soon as it all gets sorted out somebody on the left someone is applauding with those things you hit your family to sort out differences with and someone on the right is pretending that the applause is for them, going all silly with a slinky that thinks its a guitar. The 'chorus' part begins and its all the kooky guitars and the disobedient pianos and some drums together. At the end of the 'chorus' bit, the girl says 'cause I got there too late' but really fast, like a kid pretending to do jazz. Or if they could actually articulate that that was what they were trying to do. Also, I should add that she's saying really brilliant stuff really fast, so its like rap in that respect. And its sassy like independent music. I bet rap people never make their own clothes. They have sweatshop kids do it for them. T-Bozz: Clothing with a kick. Am I right?

After the third chorus it gets sad, but nothing can truly be sad with a woh woh woh synth bass thing. Some descending chromatics in a wonderful melody. The guy comes back and starts clapping again. Organs and the girl. An angry wah guitar. I might add its amazing that with these noises they are able to achieve the clarity and purpose of melody across. Some funny violin noises going up. I always wanted violins to do that instead of playing normal boring dah dah bah bah stuff. Sitting at the symphony waiting for a band director or instrument repair technician to say 'screw it' and play the next part of the Bore-inski's third boring symphony the way I want to hear it. Then he storms off the stage and across the parking lot to his Geo Metro and drives off to a fast food place cause he's Damn Hungry.

It goes into the title track then and its doing more of that electric stuff but funnier. Electric music isn't always as funny as it should be. Then a drum comes in and a guitar that goes down instead of up and its funnier. It would be great live if played by a band of cartoons. There's a little videogame part backed up by a piano. It sounds like the Fiery Furnaces, at all times, have a weird fairy godmother backing up their musical mischief with a piano, like nobody else may get it, but at least there's that piano part to hold on to. If you can't understand what's going on, just think of the piano as the nice bit that you can totally 'get'. A brief guitar bit. That's pretty cool. I hope it doesn't come back. Oh there it is. But with more guitars. That keyboard part sounds professional. When I hear melodies I think amateur or professional. There's like the melodies you write, which are okay but nobodies going to believe. Then there's the melodies that the professionals write, robots in fancy chairs, they are, and those are the meldoies that you don't want to admit that you know and you catch yourself in the company of others and humming it and then making up a song three or four notes in so that nobody catches you knowing a similar melody. They might catch you at it though, and then accuse you of being a jazzbo and then you'd be in hot water. They do a sing-a-long bit. Oh, I forgot to mention that the guy comes in and its surprising. Then it starts rocking again and people will actually start to rock to that part. Then pianos which are like the fairy godmother getting assaulted by the far-out parts of the band's rockitude, so she skips around for a while. And then there's some band-room soloing that nobody else will admit to liking. And the person that is playing is throwing in dissonant bits because dissonant is funny. And then the slinky guitars and stuff come back and they are bees. You'd better get away from their honey.

"But you ain't never getting the cargo of my blueberry boat" > okay, now we know. Things have been driving towards us, the melody the instrumentation the five or six songs-within-a-song, now we know there's some sort of purpose. The main melody is restated so we know where we are, its like a pinpoint on a map. A faint longitude and latitude, just so we can readjust our attitude. The piano goes wonky and then strings and other mellotronned sounds come in, we've never heard the Furnaces like this. A xylophone comes in and says 'there's more than just a fairy godmother watching over you'. Then robust synths beat back everything you just thought you knew to a chromatic conclusion. Pah. Breathe. phhhhew. Its over. But it isn't really. Cause that's just the first three tracks.

Blueberry Boat!!!!

Addendum:

Also played a pretty decent Sex Funeral concert. Wrestled a bit mid-song. Joined by a bassist and a keyboardist and a surprise bassist/keyboardist. Songs doubled and tripled in length and had searing saw wave parts added. A hurled cd read 'hip-hop classics vol. 2', I'm pretty sure it contained "California Love", a song that I have never and will never be okay with. Maybe its the fact that the video was long and boring and always was playing instead of something else. I waited around MTV a long time before I realized that they didn't just randomly play videos, and it was almost guaranteed that I would never see any They Might Be Giants videos. When I finally did, it was a big disappointment.

Things I did over spring vacation:

1) Made a movie

My directorial debut, "Tuesday Heartbreak", drew mixed reviews from "I liked the scene with you and Conner" to "you wasted everybody's time". The camerawork was pretty great. The soundtrack was really good, duh, cause I put it together. The script, eh. I wrote it as a series of visual images I liked the night before I came to Fresno.

2) Saw a couple movies

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Dummy. I didn't like Eternal Sunshine until I realized that the first part wasn't the whole part of the movie. That was a relief. Even then I enjoyed the movie on more of a looking level than a thinking level. Dummy was good-looking and good-thinking. I've got a thing for Adrian Brody and he's in it. He's a pretty decent actor.

3) Wrote new tunes

Three or four if you count the one that has Conner and Vanessa making ocean noises.

4) Schemes

One involves the purchase and hiding of a rather large quantity of (mostly) orange mountain dew. Hiding things is much funner when you are scared.

5) Saw plays

Scapin at Fresno High twice (hope for the theater program) and Grease at Edison High (thinking I'm going to have Megan sing lots more on James Rabbit stuff).

I'm feeling enervated and ready to learn again. B's last quarter. Going A's this one. Interested a bit in classes, knowwhaddimean?

The Pet Shop Boys sound like a desert band. It reminds me of the bad times in Fresno when its hot and there's no end to the hot and that's all there is. I can't be doing anything, maybe I wake up at two or three pm in the afternoon with the sun in my face and the terrifying reality that its too late in the day to do anything good. And that's where the keyboards come in, the soundtrack to my giving up. I've got to resign myself to the night time, a certain trapped-ness, where I'm stuck between the back room and sleep, and my activities are significantly limited. (Actually I have a plan to remedy that, but don't tell anyone.)

They remind me of the time that my neighbors across the street yelled at me for practicing the trombone. I shouldn't have been doing so in the street, but I liked the echo sound that it made off of their house. I was trying to play the theme song to the Simpsons. When I'm playing melodies and I don't know how to play them, I just concentrate on getting the rhythm down. Like instead of playing the Simpsons melody C E F# A G, I probably played C E F A G. The Pet Shop boys never quite hit the melodies right, at least in my brain. And their lyrics are so depressing, "I love you, you pay the rent"? man. And their keyboards sound musty. The melody parts, not the drum part. I believe my neighbors across the street to be Pet Shop Boys fans.

Also I don't know if I can listen to rock music anymore. Not voluntarily, at least. I think this compilation that I made is the third or fourth good one in a row. I went from OMD to Prince, that's pretty spectastic.

Chris Toth played "Punk Rock Girl" on the guitar in Mr. Weatherford's room at lunch. This is the year 1998, I think. I asked him who it was and he said The Dead Milkmen. He said that he went into the drama office every day at lunch his freshmen year and holed up in there with either the Dead Milkmen or They Might Be Giants. "Punk Rock Girl" was a powerful song for me, in terms of seperating punk from music played by punks. Few people would call the Dead Milkmen a thoroughly punk band, but look at them yukking it up in a garage in the inside of Not Richard, But Dick. See? They're punk (except one that looks like a hippie), so while "You'll Dance to Anything" is nowhere near "Anarchy in the UK" in terms of sound, its far beyond it in terms of applied punk. While the Sex Pistols became punk's first arena band, the real punks took their manifesto and started wondering what to do with it. 10+ years after that, we have the account of "Punk Rock Girl".

The bass only pops up noticeably for one second in "Punk Rock Girl". Its a simple descending figure. Dave Blood, the bass player, killed himself a few days ago. Now, Elliot Smith offing himself, that's not too unbelievable. But Dave Blood? The bass player for the happy, goofy punk band, "Bitchin Camaro" Dave Blood? "Let's Get the Baby High" Dave Blood? No way. Apparently he couldn't 'find his niche'. Fuck that. I'm never killing myself. When I'm down, I play songs on my ukelele. I'm learning "Punk Rock Girl" on the ukelele.

Also another reason that you don't know OMD is because you probably wouldn't like them. There's keyboards, and I know very few people that appreciate keyboards un-ironically. And drum machines. I think when people say 'ew, keyboards' they mean 'ew, drum machines.'

I was learning a Beatles song on the ukelele the other night and realized something. The Beatles wrote simply and with a lot of motion. There are like two hundred chords and thirty words in the song and sometimes chords change in the middle of words, this is a far cry from the mariachi music that I wake up with every morning, which I guess may be an unconcsious influence on the way I write my own music. Take for example, 1999's "Helicopter Hat"

Bpm 132

Bb - - - - - - - -
The metaphysical realization that comes from being there;
Eb - - - - - - - -
The lion of the tigers that has been caught in the snare;
F - - - - - - - -
Other people will say it normal, they'll call it a trap
Bb - - - - - - -
But actually the professional term is actually snare

That's one of the ridiculous examples, and I wrote it to be like that, but the problem was that I continued to write like that and still continue to, but not that completely terribly bad. Do you see how many words per chord? So many! Listening to my songs is like playing Supermarket Scramble and you have to take your shopping cart around the store and get the items they've told you to, but you can't think straight because the people in the audience are counting down 30! 29! 28! and you are thinking "SHUT UP YOU FOOLS!!!!!" but really you should be thinking "Canned tuna, aisle 13" but there's so much going on and the basslines are too simple.

Anyway. The Beatles taught me a lesson. I mean, a chord for every other word. That isn't the way it HAS to be, but there's something in there. Another good example is OMD, who hold their chords sometimes for a really long time, but don't have to fill up the space with a zillion words. 1982's "Sealand"

Bpm 56

G - - -
Sealand
D - - -
Forgets
G - - -
Her Friends

So I have to find something between those two. Here's some more questions. Okay, the difference between OMD and the Beatles (besides the fact that you have no idea who OMD are) is that the Beatles are part of the canon, and OMD are just a curiosity of the New Age scene for people who already have all the Depeche Mode and Human League records. And ABC records. Partially because they write for different people, partially because they are only able to write the way they do. The Beatles never wrote lyrics as oblique as "Sealand/forgets/her friends", there's too much thinking that has to be done in that line. Sealand, that's a place, okay. Forgets, hmm. The place forgets? Oh wait, there's another line: her friends. Okay, the place forgets her friends? Oh. Maybe another person that hasn't been mentioned forgets her friends as a result of being in the sealand! Now let's look at some really oblique (for the Beatles) lyrics.

Love, Love Me, Do
You Know I'll Love you
I'll always be true
So please, love me do

Hm, no problem there. Let's move on to one of their more brainy songs:

From Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds:

Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain
Where rocking horse people eat marshmellow pies,
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers,
That grow so incredibly high.

The only problem with reading these lyrics or listening to them is that they are describing something strange, but their description is still very straightforward. We're following someone to a place where rocking horse people (a weird image, but one we can picture) are eating moon pies and there's flowers all over the place and a metaphor for drug-doing. The Beatles, even when trippy, are lucid.

So that's the key to lyrics - lucidity. People have to understand what you are talking about. You can't just be like 'I've got an asterisk / multiple pastors it's / time for the undoing / you can't see what I'm doing', people will be like 'what the hell?' and then they'll zone out the lyrics and focus on the backing music, and unless you're Steely Dan (Hell of oblique, but brilliant in ways I'm not yet qualified to explain, ask me again in three months), you have no hope of winning them over. Well maybe do a Joy Division rip or put in octave keyboards, but even then you'll only be a novelty, listened to in the back seat of a car on the way to watching another band nobody cares about*, or written in online journals: 'Your picture / an inadequate display / my sporadic tendencies / on the marquee'. See, anybody can write shitty lyrics, now let's all go out and try and write some good ones. It will be hard. But be lucid, and write a bunch of good sounding chords in the parts where you don't know what to do. Melody too.

Also its funny but my favorite songs are the ones that go F G C or C G F or whatever, like the Prefab Sprout song "Faron", its their only song that's that easy, but its also my favorite. That's another way to win me over. Photos of you and your band and G F C. And lucid lyrics.

*(Not meant to be a rip against Interpol, whose shoegazer leanings I have the utmost faith in, but sure, yeah, throw Interpol in there. At least the tracks I don't like.)

I'm just going to start typing.

I have a ukelele. I got it for three dollars at a thrift store and it works and its awesome, but I fear that once the strings break, they will be broke for good. No, it isn't just my string-changing-phobia talking, it isn't really a real ukelele, but it tunes and plays like one. Just not the ability to change strings. Also I'm playing it like a real instrument, none of those phooey tunings, which is a first for me (in the chord department, like whenever I have to play chords guitar I tune it FACFAC or just play bar chords), so that's pretty special. I've learned one and a half beatles songs and a bunch of OMD songs and a Prefab Sprout song, and this is just the beginning. Wow, wouldn't that be a dorky concert, OMD, Prefab Sprout and a couple Beatles standards. Also I never got that "Beatles" was a pun on Beetles. I was really unaware of music for a long time, just regarding it as background noise to the beginning of my life, except for K.D. Lang, Nirvana, The Proclaimers and Pearl Jam, who I either heard on the radio and MTV. I know that's a wacko combination of things to remember as a kid, also the musicals Cats and Les Miserables. Those too.

I wrote a song today, its pretty brilliant, I'll record it maybe. I've been making compilations and they are all better than the worst from last quarter, but still not better than the best, actually this last one, "Elevate Me Later" approaches brilliant, but only because it works on the same principle that the very first compilation I made up here (Tenderness) did, and that's incorporate a bunch of songs that I've been completely obsessed with in one place and try and make it sound good. Here's a list of the songs that I am obsessed with that made it onto the record: "Yes Sir No Sir" by the Kinks, "Apollo" by OMD (I want to play this to my brother who is in a band named All Dead that do a song called "Apollo" also and how different are these two versions? Way.) "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" by Paul McCartney, "Five Guys Named Moe" by Joe Jackson.

I bought two vinyl albums. "Day and Night" by Joe Jackson (because of the inside which contains a wonderful picture of guys with instruments), if you are ever going to make a record and aren't sure if I'm going to buy it, include yourself and your band with a picture of every instrument that was used to record the album and maybe even a diagram talking about who plays what instrument during what part on what song, because I'm obsessed with that stuff. I think that's what extended my obsession with Ska into 'nerd' territory, because I'd buy ska compilations and look to see what bands had what line-up, I think I was eager to see a band with a 'wall of trombones' as defined by They Might Be Giants in their song "Rhythm Section Want-Ad", but the closeset it gets I think is like Less than Jake and Reel Big Fish, two mediocre ska bands that played the pop game well.

The other record I bought is Dazzle Ships by OMD and I saw it in the record store and I was like 'hmm, eh, well I already have it and its one of my favorite OMD albums, but not THAT favorite, not three-dollars-when-I-don't-have-any-money favorite. Anyway, right behind it there was another copy with little holes cut out of the cover and a fold out map of the world with a list of different time zones on the inside. You don't have to ask, I already told you I BOUGHT THAT SUCKER. And then as soon as I bought those records I was thinking of other records that I would like to own: maybe Searching for the Young Soul Rebels by Dexy's Midnight Runners, but I like records for their covers in addition to their insides, and I don't know how good a Dexy's Midnight Runners cover would be, as I recall, the cover to Too-Rye-Ay isn't that spectacular, just like a painting of Kev Row sitting in overalls and funky shoes. I think I really like the design of the cover of the OMD record, it reminds me of the cover of a certain printing of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, which I read the entire way through. By the way, I'm in school and doing pretty good at it.

Now listening to - "Don't try suicide" by Queen